'Ye' and 'Thou' among the Canterbury Pilgrims

Author / Editor
Johnson, Judith A.

Title
'Ye' and 'Thou' among the Canterbury Pilgrims

Published
Michigan Academician 10 (1977): 71-76.

Description
The pilgrims' decisions to address each other formally, as "you," or intimately, as "thou," reveal their attitudes about each other and their own social self-conceptions. Harry Bailly's central role, in terms both of the poem's structure and of fourteenth-century social structure, lends his decisions particular relevance.

Chaucer Subjects
Language and Word Studies.
Canterbury Tales--General.